A response to Climate Change disinformation at wattsupwiththat.com

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Hyperventilating on Venus

“Hyperventilating on Venus“. More juicy idiocy from Steve Goddard! I’m starting to love this guy. Steve is pondering why Venus is so hot. First he tells us that Carl Sagan, who popularized the concept of the ‘runaway greenhouse effect’, smoked marijuana. Next he tells us that sunlight doesn’t reach the surface of Venus because of thick clouds. Then that Venus is twice as reflective as Earth. So why is Venus hot? “Because it has an extremely high atmospheric pressure“! Not because of the 96% CO2 atmosphere blocking re-radiation. Not because it receives twice the solar radiation as Earth. He must be right, because weirdo Lubos Motl agrees with him…

End of story. Well… not really. This is stupid on several levels but time is short so I’ll just point you to Tamino’s Open Mind blog for some quick insight.

…In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Hansen published several papers on the planet Venus, following his Ph.D dissertation. Venus has a brightness temperature in the radio frequencies compared to the infrared. Hansen proposed that the hot surface was the result of aerosols trapping the internal energy of the planet. More recent studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus’s atmosphere was much more like Earth’s than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere…